Menu

Sony A7R

I’m still running on V4 of Lightroom at the moment, I haven’t upgraded yet because I’m not sure what kind of CC subscription (if any) to go for.

So in the meantime, processing the ARW files first through DXO Optics Pro9, outputting as DNG. Files look good.

But using the PRIME noise reduction and letting it do its thing with highlight recovery, etc. it takes hours to process the files. I don’t mind this particularly.

I had to do a lot of housekeeping on the old Mac Pro yesterday, clearing space on both the home drive and the media drive in order to be able to get the processing done and cope with a large influx of 40Mb files.

Loving the new DXO Filmpack v4 – used it to make a nice first A3 BW print of a picture of Lauren that I took on Saturday morning with the FE35. Will post in the link here. Of course there was nothing in either the shot or the print that really required a 36Mp image, but this I know. Most of the time a 12, 16 or 22Mp image is more than adequate. The 36Mp is for the edge cases where I need a very large print. Even so, there was some impressive detail in the centre of the frame.

I’ve been a Canon DSLR user (20D, 5D, 5DMkII) for the last 9 years, so the A7R is going to take quite a lot of adjusting to.

Main impression is that it’s a device for the enthusiast consumer, not the professional. That suits me fine because I am an enthusiast consumer, not a professional.

It’s nice and small and comfortable in the hand. I’m not mad keen on the overall button placement and so on, but it’s okay.

Menus and default button configuration is fine. Internet pundits can go overboard on this – the basic idea seems to be that if for some reason the engineers and designers haven’t done it exactly the way that the pundit thinks they should have, it’s because they are stupid and not photographers, rather than that they have thought about it and come to a different conclusion to the pundit who couldn’t possibly be rather opinionated and set in their ways.

The only thing I’ve done immediately is to disable the Control wheel ISO mapping. The rest I think I can see why they’ve set it up as they have, and am going to try to adjust myself before adjusting the camera.

I’m not a technical specialist but the centre-resolution using the FE35@ISO100 is completely unlike anything I’ve ever seen before at 100% zoom – combination of a great lens and no AA filter I guess. And this is a 36Mp camera, so it’s certainly looking like the camera will be capable of very large prints from this compact setup. Main job done. Too soon to tell definitively of course, but looking very promising at the moment.